When making financial decisions, such as transferring money to a savings account, making an investment, paying off credit card debt, or purchasing an item or service, customers generally want to maximize the value they receive from the transactions they engage in. To improve financial decision-making and help align short-term financial habits with long-term financial goals, customers often engage the services of financial planners, investment advisors, or other such service providers. While financial advice from such service providers can be helpful, it can be limited by being insufficiently tailored to an individual customer and corresponding to a particular time frame. For example, financial advice for many customers, particularly those who cannot afford or choose not to pay for individualized advice, is often generalized based on a rule of thumb (e.g., advising a customer to save at least 10% of his or her paycheck without considering the customer's financial profile). As a result, such generic advice may be more applicable to some customers than others, and may even be disadvantageous to certain customers.
Even when the financial advice is directed to a group of customers having financial situations that appear similar, differing values and financial priorities of those customers may necessitate different advice for each. For example, a first person may highly value financial security and thus may hold preparing for retirement as their top priority, whereas a second person may highly value the experience of traveling while they are young and thus may value spending money today more highly than saving money for tomorrow.
Further, individualized financial advice may still be limited even when it is not cost prohibitive. For example, while a financial advisor may attempt to obtain a more personalized understanding of a customer's financial state and their goals, their advice may still be limited because it is based on a high level snapshot of the customer's finances and stated goals and values. In viewing a high level snapshot of a customer's finances, information may be lost that may otherwise be captured by analyzing individual transactions as well as transactions that occur after the snapshot is taken. Further, a customer's verbalization of their values may not be accurate when viewed in comparison to the customer's actual behavior. Accordingly, generating financial advice based on a high level snapshot of a customer's financial state paired with their expressed goals and values may produce advice that is not truly tailored to that customer's situation and values at that point in time or in the future. Further, producing generic advice in association with a high level financial snapshot may provide little benefit in aiding a customer in making day-to-day financial decisions.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved systems and methods to provide customized financial advice based on transaction-level data that provides indications of the value received by the individual in relation to each transaction. Embodiments of the present disclosure are directed to this and other considerations.